This is an in-depth Met Office UK Weather forecast for the next week and beyond. Looking at the UK weather and what is happening globally, including the wildfires in the US. Bringing you this deep dive is Met Office meteorologist Honor Criswick.
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00:00Hello there, welcome to this week's Deep Dive. My name's Anna Criswick. I'm a meteorologist
00:05and presenter here at the Met Office. This is my first Deep Dive of 2025. If you haven't seen the
00:10first one of the new year, make sure to check it out. That was with Aidan talking about some of the
00:15data and also some of the new graphics that you're going to be seeing on Deep Dive videos and also
00:20in other videos too. For today though, I'll talk you through some of the UK weather. It's fairly
00:26benign, particularly if you compare it to last week with all the snow and the ice and the quite
00:32sharp frosts and the very cold temperatures that we saw last week. Definitely seeing something a
00:36bit more quieter this week and also much milder too. I'm also going to talk a little bit about
00:42what's happening elsewhere across the world. There's a named storm in Europe. There's also
00:47a tropical cyclone that's made landfall across eastern parts of Mozambique. And also, of course,
00:53it's been widely in the news, the wildfires that have taken place across parts of the US. And I
01:00have actually managed to get a guest in to talk about that with you today. That's with Nick,
01:05one of our chief meteorologists. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Firstly, though, let's talk
01:11about UK weather. So to start off with, as always, we'll take a look at the bigger picture. I'm just
01:18going to turn on the kind of air mass temperatures that we're looking at because you can see already
01:22got high pressure just to the south of the UK, quite a strong jet just to the northwest, too.
01:28But generally on the southern side of the jet, so much milder air, particularly after the very
01:32cold week that we had last week. I think it was welcome for some dragging in this kind of mild
01:37air from further south, but some quite a cold plume just further west out towards Newfoundland.
01:43That's going to become quite interesting as we head into next week. This kind of cold plume
01:48fueling the jet, perhaps bringing quite widespread unsettled weather towards the UK
01:52for the end of next week. But for this week, generally high pressure holding on,
01:57particularly across southern and central parts, giving actually quite a lot of settled weather.
02:02Unlike last week, though, that high pressure, we actually saw quite a lot of sunshine across
02:07southern and central parts. This time, though, a bit more cloud mixed up in this in this high
02:14pressure, more moisture. So we're going to see quite a lot of low cloud at times during the week,
02:18some quite foggy conditions, a chance perhaps we could even see some fog warnings issued into the
02:23week. So it's not that high pressure that we all know and love. I'm afraid it's going to be quite
02:28a cloudy high, but there is going to be some sunshine at times. I'll just turn this off
02:35and I'll run this through. So largely, most of the sunshine is actually going to be towards
02:41areas further north, northern England, parts of Northern Ireland at times are going to see plenty
02:46of sunny spells also to the lee of high ground. We've discussed this before on on deep dives,
02:52the lee of high ground. We can get some breaks in that cloudier weather. It's not going to be
02:57completely dry out across the board of the country. We do have you can see here these
03:01moving in these frontal systems moving in at times. So for most of the week, the bulk of any
03:06wet weather is going to be to the northwest, perhaps parts of western parts of the UK at
03:10times, too. And also you can see a good squeeze in the eyes of bars at times here, too, as well
03:15as that high pressure eventually sinks its way off towards the continent there. So at times the
03:20northwest, yes, it's going to be a bit windier here. Also see some outbreaks of rain and drizzle,
03:25but kind of starts and stops patchy at times, too. So on the whole, there's actually going to be
03:29quite a lot of dry weather around. But as I say, quite a cloudy high and it remains fairly similar
03:34as we head towards the weekend, too, but sort of second half of the weekend, we start to see a bit
03:40more of a transition period so that high pressures moved away towards Europe. And that's just allowing
03:46a few more frontal systems to clip into western areas, perhaps bringing a bit more unsettled
03:51weather towards more of the country as we head into next week. But as I say, for the bulk of
03:56the country, there's going to be lots of dry weather around as that high pressure holds on
04:00to start with. And another thing you'll notice if I just split the week up a little bit, I'll move
04:07on to I'll move it on to Wednesday so we can see what's happening for the beginning of the weekend.
04:11But you can see most days are fairly similar. It doesn't change too much. You can see as we head
04:18into tomorrow once again, as I mentioned, those frontal systems moving into the northwest,
04:22bringing in some outbreaks of rain, also some strong winds here at times fairly similar on
04:27Thursday, too. But you can see there are some breaks in the clouds on Wednesday. Once again,
04:32Northern Ireland, northern parts of England, parts of Scotland should see some sunshine,
04:36but across sort of southern and southeastern areas of the country on Wednesday, quite cloudy,
04:42perhaps quite some quite low cloud and murkiness at times fairly similar on Thursday, though not
04:46quite seeing as much of that sunshine as a bit more of a kind of slice across northern parts
04:51of the UK. And once again, to the lee of high ground across Scotland, likely to see some sunny
04:56spells and that cloud once again Friday, perhaps a bit more widespread similar on Saturday, too.
05:01Once again, that frontal system moving into the northwest, but there will be some sunshine around
05:06is what I'm trying to say. Also lots of dry weather, but it really depends on your location
05:11as to whereabouts we're going to see that sunshine, as I say, also to the lee of high ground.
05:16Also some quite strong winds at times to the northwest of Scotland,
05:21sort of easing as later on to Friday, but picking up once again on Saturday. So that's another thing
05:25we'll have to keep an eye on. But on the whole, the weather across the UK is fairly similar,
05:30fairly quiet as we head into this week. An interesting thing is with temperatures. So
05:38once again, I'll just move this towards Wednesday so that we can see Saturday on there as well.
05:43So we can see on Wednesday, very mild for the time of year. I think average for the UK is about
05:48seven degrees Celsius, I think slightly lower for Scotland, probably more towards five or six.
05:53But we can see on Wednesday across the country, more nines, tens. So it is going to be mild for
05:58the time of year, fairly similar into Thursday. But we can see there are some areas that are
06:03starting to dip more sixes and sevens. And then it's as we head towards the weekend,
06:08you can see particularly across the southeast in some areas, highs only around three to four
06:12Celsius. So by the time we get to Saturday, it is going to be feeling chillier, particularly
06:17across the far south and southeast. And it's also going to be quite cloudy. We could see if we see
06:22some breaks, particularly we could see some frosty conditions, but it's going to be fairly
06:27localised. But by the time we start the weekend, quite dull, quite chilly, not kind of like the
06:34conditions that we had the weekend before, where there was actually quite a lot of sunshine around.
06:38It was still pretty cold, colder than this in some places, but there's not going to be quite
06:42as much sunshine around, I'm afraid. But we can see as well across the temperatures for the UK,
06:48it's the northwest that really holds onto that milder air. So, yes, it's going to be windier
06:52here, wet at times, but this is where it's going to stay mild. So even as we head into Saturday,
06:56still could see highs of around eight, nine Celsius. But this is where we really do hold
07:01onto that mild air. And it was across the north of Scotland actually last week that was quite
07:06interesting. We got down to, I think it was minus 18.9 Celsius. That was in Alton Harbour
07:13during Saturday morning. That's the coldest temperature we have seen since 2010. But 48
07:19hours later, the temperature actually rose by 30 degrees. So there was a big temperature
07:24difference across Scotland. And this is the area where we're really holding onto that milder air
07:31too. So temperatures have really been up and down if you take into consideration last week too.
07:37But on the whole, if I can see if I can get up some graphs view across London,
07:44see if I can get this right. Bear with me, see if I can get this going.
07:53There we go. Didn't click on the right button. So for example, areas further south, you know,
07:57we do hold onto that milder air for a time. But as we head into next week, temperatures do lower,
08:03but it looks like they do start to rise again as we head into the new week. But for example,
08:08over the weekend, it looks like we could see some quite chilly temperatures here, for example,
08:12at lows of around two Celsius across this south. But as I say, further north,
08:17largely holding onto that milder air, temperatures not changing too much, perhaps by
08:21a degree or two. And once again, those overnight temperatures milder again also.
08:27So as I say, the weather kind of for the UK, fairly benign, mild, particularly in the northwest,
08:33but looks like we could start to see some chillier weather as we head into the weekend. But as I say,
08:38it's going to be quite cloudy across the world. So if we head over to Europe, for example,
08:44if I'm just going to turn off this and turn on a few other features, there we go. So you
08:52can see this area of low pressure developing across central parts of the Mediterranean.
08:57That's actually become a named storm by the Italian Met Service, Storm Felix. Yep,
09:01they've called it Storm Felix. And we could actually see some quite heavy rainfall,
09:06some quite high rainfall totals and quite strong winds at times. Also, a little bit of snow, too,
09:12as we as we head as we head into this week. So a chance we could see some disruption across parts
09:18of Europe. It looks like the bulk of the heaviest rain is largely going to be across eastern parts
09:23of Sicily, Sicily, sorry, Sardinia as well, for example, could also see some quite quite high
09:31rainfall totals peak of the event. We could see around 300 millimetres here. So definitely a
09:36chance we could see some disruption as a result of this storm, could see some thunderstorms as well
09:41with where we do get the kind of heaviest rainfall totals. And we could also see
09:46some snowfall at times, too. So for the Atlas Mountains, for example, across parts of
09:51parts of Algeria and also some snow across the highest points of Italy, too. So there is
09:57definitely a bit more weather going on if you if you if you take a look across the world. And once
10:02again, hopefully this isn't making you too dizzy. If I move further south, just going to turn
10:11those off because they look a little bit strange. Just zoom this in. There's also.
10:17Oh, that's not working. There we go. Well, we can see there's also a tropical cyclone, which
10:22has made landfall across western parts of Mozambique. Once again, heavy rainfall,
10:28some quite strong winds. I think yesterday it made landfall wind speeds around 85 miles per hour,
10:33100 miles per hour gusts. So some impacts here. One we have kept an eye on. It wasn't that long
10:39ago. I think it was towards the end of last year. We saw tropical cyclone Chido also really impact
10:45areas here. I think it was Mayotte, which saw total destruction of some villages here. So one
10:49we've been keeping an eye on. This looks like the track of it is just going to move through the
10:54Mozambique Channel and probably intensifying a little bit more as it does. So I'm just going to
11:00check, check my stats here. So it looks like as it does intensify, we're going to see wind speeds,
11:05perhaps around 100, 120 miles per hour, largely moving through the Mozambique Channel, though
11:12it could affect a very small island island of Europa. I believe it is a small French territory,
11:18but it's very, very small area here. Not many people there. A very small chance as it moves
11:24its way southwards, it could just clip the far southwest of Madagascar. Here we could see some
11:29quite heavy rainfall. Once again, we could very small chance we could see peaks of 300 millimetres
11:34here. But it looks like at the moment, widely 50 to 100 millimetres, a chance we could see 100 to
11:40200 millimetres across obviously an area that's normally fairly dry. So a chance we could also
11:44see some impacts here. If I go over to, this is from Meteo France. So this is the kind of the
11:52track so far, this more black line and then this green and red area here. This is the track that
11:58it looks like it's going to start to move through over the coming days. So it looks like it is
12:03largely going to avoid southwestern parts of Madagascar. I think there's a less than 20%
12:10chance they could make landfall here, but it's generally going to sweep past, but it's still
12:14going to bring those strong winds and also those heavy outbreaks of rain. I've also actually got
12:19a satellite image here. This is from earlier today. I think you can see it. It's just the eye of the
12:24storm here and you can see this area of clouds swirling around. So quite an intense storm here.
12:30Looks like it's going to intensify as it moves southwards across the Mozambique Channel
12:34and then it'll eventually decay across the southern Indian Ocean. So, you know, a couple
12:40things going on around the world. And another thing, of course, which I'm sure you've seen in
12:46the news is the wildfires across parts of L.A. causing lots of destruction here. There's still
12:52fires going on at the moment, all caused by a number of things. The Santa Ana winds. We've also
12:57had some very wet weather here and then also some very dry weather. So lots of vegetation has grown.
13:03That's all dried up and has caused and basically acted as fuel for these fires to intensify. And
13:10also the topography of the area has been an added factor into these wildfires. There's still some
13:16going. Winds have eased off a little bit, but it looks like they're set to intensify a little bit
13:20more as we head into the coming days. Wind speeds not quite as strong, but there is obviously the
13:26wind speeds are going to pick up further fueling and moving these fires along. So I was lucky
13:31enough to convince one of the chief meteorologists, Nick Silkstone, to come in and chat to me about
13:37that. So I managed to chat to him earlier. So let's take a look at what he had to say.
13:41OK, hi, Nick. Thank you for joining us today. First deep dive of 2025.
13:47You're very welcome. Yeah, I feel like maybe some of the audience might recognize your face.
13:53Thank you for joining us today. We're going to be talking about the wildfires. I'm sure many
13:58of you have seen in the news all the destruction and devastation that this event has caused. And
14:04one of the key players in this event is actually something what we call the Santa Ana winds. So
14:09can we start off by a little explanation around what exactly those are, Nick?
14:13Of course, we like to name many winds of the world, don't we?
14:17We do, yeah.
14:19This one's actually named after a settlement or a range of mountains in the far south of
14:24California in the southwestern USA called the Santa Ana Mountains. And it's a frequent dry,
14:30hot northeasterly wind that blows across this region. It has various peaks and troughs as you
14:36go through the year, but it tends to be sort of like an intermittent feature from around October
14:40to March, most winters across North America. And Santa Ana, the region itself, is just a prime
14:46location for basically flow through these mountain passes and over the mountains. It produces a very
14:51strong, locally enhanced and dry wind on the downslopes basically along the Californian coast.
14:56But although Santa Ana wind is used in the press locally, there are many more terms to these winds.
15:01For example, the San Bernardino Mountains are probably the feature that caused the winds that
15:07exacerbated the fires around Malibu and some of the ones most frequently seen in the media
15:11over the past days.
15:12Okay. Right. Okay. And obviously it was the Santa Ana winds which was sort of
15:18one of the key players in the events that we've seen over the last few days. And can you talk us
15:23around the kind of general weather set up that we've seen that's resulted in this kind of this
15:28wind flow?
15:29So it's a very localized name, Santa Ana, but the actual pattern that leads to it is much faster.
15:34So essentially across North America in the winter half a year, instead of October to November,
15:40if we have surges of cold air, we tend to get high pressure that builds to the east of the
15:45Rockies and results in an area of higher pressure across the Rockies itself in this area called the
15:50Great Basin. This is the case that we had here. So big high slap bang of this part of the world.
15:57In the winter, they're quite cold, which sort of reverses the difference from summer where the
16:01high terrain is actually relatively hot compared to the marine areas elsewhere.
16:06So we often end up with lower pressure to the southwest of the high down across
16:10the Pacific coastline of California.
16:14That produces this large pressure gradient from high to low from northeast to southwest across
16:20this region. So we know that in the northern hemisphere, winds rotate clockwise around highs
16:27and generally rotate anticlockwise around lows. And this event, although the highs often build
16:36when you have this cold surge, was made ever more notable by something we call an upper trough that
16:41generated a deeper than normal area of low pressure just actually to the south of California.
16:46It was nearer the Baja California Peninsula in this case. So it's a big pressure gradient,
16:52northeasterly winds are pushed down from the Great Basin in this region. They hit the Sierra Nevada
16:57Mountains, which are much higher than these two ranges we've talked here, and they basically act
17:01as a block on the flow. It's not able to ascend and go over there, so it's forced to divert and
17:06find basically the greps and the lower parts of the terrain to flow through. So these purple lines
17:11are indicating where the wind was going, think of them as like streamlines, and where
17:17they're packed together as in the case moving through these mountain passes just to the south
17:20of Sierra Nevada, they're forced to accelerate and the wind speed increases. But then we've got
17:26little sort of ripples in the flow, you can imagine the pebbles or little weirs in some
17:31bit of the stream. The San Bernardino Mountains and their various passes that run through them,
17:36and the Santa Ana Mountains here. And basically I've got this little zoom in of the topography
17:41you can see within this approximately this box I've drawn here in the southwest, with the
17:46reds being the higher topography and the blues being the lower topography. And here is our flow
17:51around the Sierra Nevada, here's the San Bernardino Range in reds, and here are the various little
17:56gaps and passes, you can probably see is where the roads and rivers and various little bits of
17:59pieces run around it. And the flow is forced through here like a channeling through a gap,
18:04you could think of that as like the Bernoulli Principle, where if you force flow through a
18:08smaller gap, you know constrict it through a pipe, the pressure lowers and it has to speed up.
18:13And there's also mountain wave type effects that can lead to strong downslope flow and a way to
18:18visualize that is like the flow of water trundled along hitting a weir in a stream, and it's forced
18:23to say go from a what we call subcritical to supercritical depth and it flashes down the
18:29slope of it and speeds up as well. And both of these factors in various paces came into play
18:36and it was there and very much an extreme on probably the 8th of January, which was the
18:41really strong wind day during this event. Yeah, and this is where this satellite image down here
18:45just to the bottom left is as well, where we can see the kind of smoke plume can't we around the
18:50area. This image was taken on the 10th I believe, so a couple of days, so the fires had ignited,
18:58in that place and yeah it's mapped on the same area you can see, but these plumes you can see
19:02emanating down towards the southwest are basically sourced from the points of where the very sort of
19:07strong or severe wildfires were burning and then been displaced by the ambient wind in that
19:11direction, hence what you'd expect with the Santa Ana winds continuing, although not as strong as on
19:16the 8th, which make the containment of these quite a problem. And there's a couple, there's one more
19:21thing about these winds like as well as the air being forced to accelerate through the gap, it
19:26comes down from an area of very high terrain in the Great Basin, down much closer to sea level on
19:30the Pacific coast of California, and when it descends it's compressed, so it warms, imagine if
19:36you're compressing air in a bicycle pump, and also because it's warming the relative humidity doesn't
19:42gain any more water vapour, so the relative humidity, the relative amount of water vapour in
19:45it, well amounts of water vapour are the same, so the relative humidity drops, so you end up with a very
19:49hot, very dry wind down there, which is great for you know drying out any last remnants of moisture
19:55and any vegetation or anything that could be a fire source, and then also if a fire does ignite
19:59the strength of the wind is really fanning the flames, you know it provides oxygen into that fire
20:03to help it grow and become very intense, and also allows the fire front to progress very quickly
20:08as opposed to light winds where it would you know be much more stationary. Yeah, and obviously I mean
20:14we have this kind of Santa Ana wind set up, as you sort of mentioned, as the air sort of flows over
20:20it's drying out, we've got quite low relative humidity, but it was also the weather kind of in previous
20:26years, and also the lead up to the event we had quite a wet season where all the vegetation
20:31was able to grow, and then it went really dry didn't it? Fuel is such an important thing for a
20:36wildfire risk, and some of the worst wildfire seasons we've seen around the world, for example
20:40in parts of Australia as well, have often been preempted by a wet spell, you know a season or two
20:46prior to that, again the case here, so this is looking at the statewide precipitation rankings
20:53for the entire US for the whole of 2024, so I can explain it, there's 130 years in the data set,
21:00basically you know within that 130 how wet was this year, and 130 would be the wettest year in that
21:05data set, you can see we're 101 across the statewide area of California, so in the 130 years there were
21:11only 29 years that were wetter than 2024, but you can drill down into that, this is some commentary
21:18that they provided at the top, and you can see it says the year started out relatively wet for much
21:21of the region, because we had the strong El Nino in the Pacific, and that's associated with
21:27atmospheric river events into California, so they had an incredible snowpack last year and a much
21:31wetter than normal winter into the spring this year, but then beyond that as the El Nino subsided
21:37you see the second half of the year has been dry, and they've even had drought development and
21:41expansion across that region, so vegetation that grew in the spring and the early summer
21:47will have since dried out and possibly died due to the developing drought, and that leaves a
21:53source of fuel, let's say once you add the meteorology into that, it's potent if you get
21:58ignition of a fire. Yeah exactly, so it almost had the perfect ingredients didn't it, to sort of
22:04create such a quite magnificent event kind of thing? I forget the exact statistics, but it's
22:09something of the order of a decade or more since they've had such a marked strong Santa Ana wind
22:14event in that area of Los Angeles, so yeah around like 10 years since we saw
22:21anything of comparable strength to the events on the 8th, which was the absolute peak of the winds.
22:26Wow okay yeah, so obviously the general setup, the Santa Ana winds obviously, and the
22:32topography of the area, and also kind of looking ahead too, there's a chance that we
22:39might start to see these, I mean the winds have lightened off now haven't they, but there's a
22:43chance they could increase a little bit more, but not quite to the extent that they were a few days
22:48ago. This was the event on the 8th itself, the exceptional day, so sorry the coastline's not
22:54clear, 100% clear of this, but we're looking at California here, this is the Los Angeles region
22:59down here, and where you can see the colours, the brighter the colours are, the purples to reds as
23:04you go up the side, equals the stronger winds. And on the 8th we had, as we described before,
23:09high pressure up in the gray space, in this case the low was across the Gulf of California, but we
23:12had that very strong pressure gradient, you can see it was blocked by the Sierra Nevada, funnelled
23:17through the gaps and then the localised topography enhanced it further. On the 8th we were looking at
23:23mean wind speeds, even modelling at global model scales, in excess of gale force, they reckon
23:2980 plus mile per hour gusts on the ground. I should say that the pattern of high pressure
23:34up here and lower pressure down here is maintained through this coming week,
23:39but the strength of the two, or the strength of the gradient between the two is much weaker
23:44than it was on the day of the 8th when the fires erupted and spread massively, so
23:50Santa Ana winds will continue, so dry hot winds unfortunately, with very low humidity in this
23:55part of the world, and although they're not going to be as severe as this, there's now four large
23:59wildfires burning and they're still going to be strong enough to make it a challenge to contain
24:06such wildfires, so it's going to be challenging for firefighting for the next few days, at least
24:10in that part of the world. And then longer term, looking at the patterns for the coming week or
24:16two, again the pattern across the US suggests colder air over into the east of the Rockies
24:22which tends to lead to higher pressure here, which is favourable for further incidents of Santa Ana
24:27winds as we go through into the latter part of January. Yeah, not a lot of rain on the cards
24:32either to sort of help out the fires that are already there. No, it's a dry part of the world,
24:39it depends who you look at, I think the Americans have just declared a La Nina, the Australians have
24:44yet to, but that has the opposite effects often for California and suggests drier winters
24:52during La Nina type conditions. This part of the world, very little if any precip is signalled
24:56during the coming week or two I'm afraid. Okay, well thank you so much for talking that through
25:01Nick, you did a much better explanation than I thought I would have been able to do, so thank
25:05you so much for that. And obviously here at the Met Office we'll be keeping an eye on things,
25:09I'm sure there'll be much more in the news and obviously our thoughts go out to those who have
25:13been affected, but thank you Nick and I'm sure we'll get you on here again soon since you're so
25:17good at explaining things. But yeah, otherwise let's move on. A big thank you to Nick for taking
25:24time out of his day to chat to us around the wildfires and I hope you enjoyed a bit of a look
25:30around some global meteorology today as the weather's fairly quiet across the UK. If you want
25:36some more content, well there's actually a new video by Alex Deakin, we can put the link in here
25:41so you can check it out straight away. Talking about, if you've ever wondered what exactly we're
25:46talking about, he talks through synoptic charts and what the different frontal systems mean
25:52and he goes through all of that and it's a really interesting video, I've watched it myself,
25:55so make sure you do take a look using the link. Otherwise that is it for today, I hope you enjoyed
26:01this video, give it a like if you did, share it around with your friends and if you have any
26:06questions or comments do leave them and we'll take a look and we can even answer some questions you
26:11may have on the live on Friday, that's at 12.15, that'll be with me and also Alex Burke here, so
26:16yeah if you do have any questions I'll take a look before Friday, leave them in the comments
26:21and they may be answered during the Weather Studio Live. Otherwise that is it from me,
26:27I hope you have a fantastic week and I'll chat to you again soon.